Memoirs of a Geisha - by Arthur Golden
Published:
Memoirs of a Geisha - by Arthur Golden
Read: 2024-10-27
Recommend: 10/10
A great book resonates deeply with the reader. When I read about how the apprentice learned to please a man on her journey to becoming a geisha, I was reminded of my own experience learning to ‘please’ a reviewer under my PhD advisors’ guidance. This book explores themes of hope, envy, revenge, and kindness.
Back in 2008, I was puzzled when Lin Chi-ling (林志玲) spoke about ‘women being like water’ in several interviews promoting her movie Red Cliff. Now, I realize that her inspiration may have come from this book, which was adapted into a movie in 2005.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
It took me a while to understand that my father had been married before, a long time ago, and that his whole family had died. I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
Somehow or other we stumbled toward each other in the dark until we were hugging. I found that all I could think about was how bony she’d grown. She stroked my hair in a way that made me think of my mother, which caused my eyes to well up so much I might as well have been underwater.
There I threw the coins into the offertory box—coins that might have been enough to take me away from Gion—and announced my presence to the gods by clapping three times and bowing. With my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands together, I prayed that they permit me to become a geisha somehow. I would suffer through any training, bear up under any hardship, for a chance to attract the notice of a man like the Chairman again.
“Waiting patiently doesn’t suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about—the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a box. There’s no doubt it’s the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can’t survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven’t drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?”
In winter, both Pumpkin and I were made to toughen up our hands by holding them in ice water until we cried from pain, and then practice outside in the frigid air of the courtyard. I know it sounds terribly cruel, but it’s the way things were done back then. And in fact, toughening the hands in this way really did help me play better. You see, stage fright drains the feeling from your hands; and when you’ve already grown accustomed to playing with hands that are numbed and miserable, stage fright presents much less of a problem.
A man is interested in only one thing. Believe me, you’ll understand all too soon what I’m talking about. In the meantime, you can keep him happy by letting him think he’s permitted to see parts of your body no one else can see. If an apprentice geisha acts the way you did just then—pouring tea just like a maid would—the poor man will lose all hope. Try it again, but first show me your arm.
“You’re a clever girl, Sayuri. I don’t need to tell you what will become of your future if Dr. Crab or Nobu should lose interest in you. You mustn’t let either of them think you’re paying too much attention to the other. But of course a certain amount of jealousy won’t do any harm. I’m certain you can manage it.”
I’m ashamed to admit how hard I’d worked over the years to keep from thinking about Satsu, and my father and mother, and our tipsy house on the sea cliffs. I’d been like a child with my head in a bag. All I’d seen day after day was Gion, so much so that I’d come to think Gion was everything, and that the only thing that mattered in the world was Gion. But now that I was outside Kyoto, I could see that for most people life had nothing to do with Gion at all; and of course, I couldn’t stop from thinking of the other life I’d once led. Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
If you ask me why most of these parties were so dull, I think probably there are two reasons. First, just because a young girl has been sold by her family and raised from an early age to be a geisha doesn’t mean she’ll turn out to be clever, or have anything interesting to say. And second, the same thing goes for the men. Just because a man has made enough money to come to Gion and waste it however he chooses doesn’t mean he’s fun to be around.
When I heard these words, my tears simply broke through the fragile wall that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
“Young girls hope all sorts of foolish things, Sayuri. Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.”
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
Usually when he first came, the Chairman talked for a time about his workday. He might tell me about troubles with a new product, or about a traffic accident involving a truckload of parts, or some such thing. Of course I was happy to sit and listen, but I understood perfectly well that the Chairman wasn’t telling these things to me because he wanted me to know them. He was clearing them from his mind, just like draining water from a bucket. So I listened closely not to his words, but to the tone of his voice; because in the same way that sound rises as a bucket is emptied, I could hear the Chairman’s voice softening as he spoke. When the moment was right, I changed the subject, and soon we were talking about nothing so serious as business, but about everything else instead, such as what had happened to him that morning on the way to work; or something about the film we may have watched a few nights earlier there at the Eishin-an; or perhaps I told him a funny story I might have heard from Mameha, who on some evenings came to join us there. In any case, this simple process of first draining the Chairman’s mind and then relaxing him with playful conversation had the same effect water has on a towel that has dried stiffly in the sun. When he first arrived and I washed his hands with a hot cloth, his fingers felt rigid, like heavy twigs. After we had talked for a time, they bent as gracefully as if he were sleeping.